At 2:53 that Thursday afternoon, I was standing on the loading dock behind our store with both arms wrapped around a fifty pound sack of cracked corn, sweat cutting a line down the back of my shirt, when my phone buzzed in my apron pocket against my hip. I let the sack drop onto the pallet, peeled off one glove with my teeth, and answered it still catching my breath.
“Mrs. Holcomb, this is Winnie Aldrich over at Mercer Properties,” the voice said, bright and businesslike, the voice of a woman reading down a checklist. “I’m calling to get the annual fire insurance walkthrough on the calendar for the new ten year term. Mr. Mercer likes to get that scheduled within thirty days of the renewal going final, and since the renewal closed back on March the fourth, we’re already running a little behind.”
I stood there with corn dust on my forearms and a dead phone signal roaring in my ears for what felt like a full minute before I found my voice.
“Winnie, I think you’ve got the wrong file,” I said. “We haven’t signed any ten year renewal. I haven’t even seen a ten year renewal.”
“I’m looking right at it,” she said, not unkindly, just puzzled that I would push back on something so plainly documented. “Both partners’ signatures, notarized March fourth, right here in Mr. Mercer’s office. Rance came in that morning with the paperwork.”
March the fourth. I did not need to check a calendar to know exactly where I had been that day, because I had spent it two hours west at the Cheyenne County Livestock Auction with my son, bidding on eleven head of bred heifers, standing in a cold metal bleacher with an auction paddle in my hand from nine in the morning until well past three in the afternoon. I had never been anywhere near Garland Mercer’s office. I had never signed anything. And somewhere on a document sitting in a file cabinet across town, my name said otherwise.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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